A Senate bill that would have banned gay couples from adopting or fostering children appears to be dead this legislative session.

The measure’s sponsor, Republican Sen. Gary Tapp of Shelbyville, said Senate leaders will not bring Senate Bill 68 to a vote in the final four days of the legislative session. Tapp said Wednesday that he plans to file the bill again next year.

The bill would restrict future foster and adoptive parents to people who are married under Kentucky law, which would eliminate gay couples or unmarried couples from adopting or becoming foster parents.

A similar bill has been developed in Tennessee. Three states – Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas- currently have laws that outlaw adoption by unmarried couples.

The event was organized by Louisville’s Fairness Campaign to protest the bill, which would bar anyone “cohabitating with a sexual partner outside of marriage” from becoming a foster or adoptive parent. It would apply to heterosexual couples but gay-rights supporters argue it is aimed at gay couples and is modeled on an Arkansas law passed last year to ban gay foster and adoptive parents.

Opponents argue it would also limit the number of foster and adoptive parents in a state that has more than 7,000 children in need of care who have been removed from homes because of abuse or neglect.

About 1,878 Kentucky children are eligible for adoption – or soon will be as their parental rights are terminated, Vikki Franklin, a spokeswoman for the Cabinet for Health and Family Services said. Of those whose parental rights have been terminated, the state is still seeking adoptive homes for 422, she said.

Under the legislation, children who were already placed in such homes before the legislation was enacted would not be uprooted.

Chris Hartman, head of The Fairness Campaign, said the legislation unjustly rules out potentially good parents just because they’re not married in the traditional sense.

“We literally can’t afford to play politics with these children’s lives,” Hartman said. “Hundreds of children are awaiting adoption each day in Kentucky, and it should be our politicians’ jobs to find them a home, not to categorically eliminate potential loving parents with an anti-gay political attack.”

David Edmunds, a spokesman for The Family Foundation, said the legislation isn’t discriminatory toward gay and lesbian couples because it also bars unmarried heterosexual couples from adoption and foster care.

Hartman said at least six other states – Arkansas, Florida, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska and Utah – have similar laws that he called “direct attacks” on nontraditional couples. The Kentucky measure, he said, “is irresponsible on every front” and isn’t likely to pass during the current legislative session.

The Kentucky Court of Appeals has ruled that gays and lesbians must be excluded from step-parent style adoptions.

According to The Courier-Journal, a local woman cannot adopt her partner’s biological child, because “stepparent adoptions are allowed only when the stepmother or father is married to the biological parent, and marriages between gays are forbidden by both statute and Kentucky’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.”

Ten states recognize “stepparent-like adoptions,” according to the ACLU, including most recently Colorado, which last year enacted a law allowing same-sex couples, as well as grandparents, aunts, uncles and other relatives, to jointly adopt children.

Advocates say that if a child can’t be adopted by his second parent, the child loses the right to inherit property from that parent, or receive Social Security benefits or life insurance benefits, or to be eligible for health insurance under that parent’s policy or to sue for their wrongful death.